Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
page 4
news from the EGI communityISSUE 26FEBRUARY 2017
THE NEW PROJECTS ISSUE
page 6
MOREAdvanced Computingfor Research
www.egi.eu
EOSCpilot: getting the EOSC startedpage 3
Inspired
AGINFRA+: food & agriculture research
01 Computing centres: ReCaS Bari
RISCAPE: e-infrastructure landscapes
09 Next EGI Conference: Catania 9-12 May
page 5NextGEOSS: Earth Observation
OTHER STORIES
page 7AARC's attribute management pilot
page 8
EGI Federated Cloud architecture
In the new edition of our newsletter, we focus on thenew projects starting in 2017 and the contributions ofthe EGI Community.
Your feedback and suggestions are always welcome!
Send an email to Sara & Iulia at:
Welcome to issue 26!
1Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
The Bari ReCaS data center has beenbuilt by the University of Bari Aldo Moroand the National Institute of NuclearPhysics within the framework of theReCaS project.The data centre was completed in July2015 and inaugurated on July 9, 2015.The ReCaS-Bari data center is home to128 servers (equipped with AMDprocessors) for a total of about 10.000cores. The data centre has a storagecapacity of about 5PByte of disk and 2.5PByte of tape.This data centre is serving manycommunities with diverse technologies:OpenStack, HTCondor, and a typical HPCcluster with infiniband and GPU.ReCaS Bari is a data centre fulllyintegrated in the EGI federation and isalso an EGI Federated Cloud provider.Besides serving scientists at a Europeanlevel, the data centre also supportsabout 160 local users from high-energyphysics, theoretical physics, medicalphysics and biosciences.
Computing centres: ReCaS Bari data centre
Giacinto Donvito
More information
Bari ReCaS DataCenter
https://www.recas-bari.it/
Your Data Centre
If you work with or at one of the +300data centres federated in the EGI e-infrastructure, we would love to hearfrom you!Send your pictures to [email protected]
2
The IBM research team in Zurichset up a project to develop amethodology for estimating theperformance, power consump-tion and cost of exascalesystems. The project is calledAlgorithms and Machines (A&M)and is part of DOME, a jointprogram with the NetherlandsInstitute for Radio Astronomy(ASTRON).
The main objective of this colla-boration is to develop techno-logies to support the SquareKilometre Array (SKA), the world'slargest radio telescope currentlybeing developed.
The A&M team set out to modelan exascale computing systemrequired by the SKA data proces-sing pipeline. This system andthe software running on it mayallow an early and fast design-space exploration. To constructthe software model, the A&Mmethodology used a platform-independent software analysistool that measures softwareproperties (such as availablescalar and vector instructionmix, parallelism, memory accesspatterns and communicationbehaviour). As the softwaremodels are extracted at appli-cation run-time, they can only becollected on current systemswhich are orders of magnitudesmaller than exascale. To predictthe software models at exascale,the methodology used an extra-polation tool which employsadvanced statistical techniques.Once extrapolated, the softwaremodel was then combined with
EGI data centre helps the IBM research lab to modelan exascale computing system
Giuseppe La Rocca tells how Poland's PSNC will support the IBM team to create anew software model
a hardware modelthat capturesthe performance constraints anddependencies of a computersystem. The mathematical for-mulas allow for a fast explorationof a large design-space ofhardware processor- andnetwork-related parameters.
To validate the analytical perfor-mance estimates, the A&M teamrequired access to systems withdifferent network topologies,(e.g., fat-tree and dragonfly). Theteam contacted EGI for supportto obtain service access to suchsystems. EGI identified thePoznan Supercomputing andNetwork Center (PSNC) inPoland as a provider to offersuch an environment and kickedstarted the collaboration.
PSNC offered access to Orzel /Eagle, a supercomputer with aperformance of 1.4 PFlopscomputing power and a fat-treenetwork interconnect fabric. TheA&M team then ran MPI appli-cations of different problemsizes and number of MPIprocesses on the system, usingconfigurations of two and three-
More information
Giuseppe La Rocca is part ofthe EGI Foundation TechnicalOutreach team.
level fat-tree topologies. The firstvalidation results for the MPI-simple implementation of Graph500 (a MPI benchmark foranalytics workloads) showedthat the analytical methodologycan estimate the time perfor-mance with an accuracy of 82%,which is a very encouragingresult. In the future, more MPIapplications will be analysed tovalidate the A&M methodology.
This work was done in thecontext of the joint ASTRON andIBM DOME project and wasfunded by the Dutch Ministry ofEconomic Affairs and theProvince of Drenthe. The IBMA&M team is very pleased withthe involvement of specialistsfrom PSNC and thankful to EGIfor its efforts of intermediatingthe partnership with PSNC.
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
3
The EOSCpilot project willsupport the first phase in thedevelopment of EuropeanCommission’s flagship initiative,the European Open ScienceCloud (EOSC): a trusted andopen environment for theEuropean scientific communityto share, store and re-usescientific data.
The project brings togetherstakeholders from researchinfrastructures and e-Infrastructure providers and willengage with related funders andpolicy makers to create an openenvironment to use researchdata, knowledge and services.
EOSCpilot is coordinated bySTFC and involves 33participants in total, includingthe EGI Foundation on behalf ofthe EGI community.
The kick-off meeting of theEOSCpilot took place inAmsterdam, from the 17th tothe 18th of January.
EOSCpilot: getting the European Open Science Cloudoff the ground
Tiziana Ferrari summarises what we learned at the project's kick-off meeting
Goals of the EOSCpilotThe main objectives are:
> to develop a number of pilotsthat integrate services andinfrastructures to demonstrateinteroperability in a number ofscientific domains
> to establish the governanceframework for the EOSC andcontribute to the developmentof European open science policy
> to engage with stakeholdersand research communities foran open approach to scientificresearch
EGI’s contribution to theprojectEGI will co-lead the WP5 (Services)contributing to the definition ofthe EOSC federation model, ofits overall architecture and therules of participation as serviceprovider. Within WP5 ServicesEGI will lead the service pilotstask participated by European e-Infrastructures and ResearchInfrastructures.
EGI will also bring its experiencein community engagement,community applicationintegration and training withinWP4 (Science Demonstrators)and WP7 (Skills).
EGI is involved in five initialpilots:
Pan-cancer analysis of wholegenomesEOSCpilot goal: accelerategenomic analysis on the EOSC
How: improve the computingcompetencies and include VMdeployment and datamanagement to be easily used
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
What is the European Open Science Cloud?
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to accelerate andsupport the current transition to more effective Open Scienceand Open Innovation in the Digital Single Market.It should enable trusted access to services, systems and the re-use of shared scientific data across disciplinary, social andgeographical borders.
in Realising the European Open Science Cloudhttp://go.egi.eu/hleg-eosc
4
The photon-neutroncommunityEOSCpilot goal: improve thecommunity’s computing facilities
How: by creating a virtualplatform for all users (e.g., forusers with no storage facilities attheir home institutes)
The ICOS infrastructureEOSCpilot goal: enable acomparable data access acrossmultiple research communities
How: by working on dataintegration and harmonisedaccess
The Parthenos projectEOSCpilot goal: enable anadvanced text-based servicebased on shared semantics
How: by developing newsoftware to enable a semanticenrichment of text sources andmake it available on the EOSC.
The High-Energy Physicscommunity (HEP)EOSCpilot goal: a long-termpreservation and larger-scaleuse of physics data
How: deployment of HEP data inthe EOSC via a webportal andopen it up to other researchcommunities.
The European Open ScienceCloud for Research will bringtogether the European ITinfrastructure and will create anopen network for sharingresearch data and knowledge.The EOSCpilot project is the firststep towards reaching this goal.
More information
Tiziana Ferrari is thetechnical director of the EGIFoundation.
EOSCpilot websitehttp://www.eoscpilot.eu/
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
EGI involvement in the EOSCpilot
WP4 Science DemonstratorsObjective: to develop Science Demonstrators in domains thatwill show the relevance of the EOSC Services and how theyenable data reuse. EGI is involved in 5 use cases (see text fordetails).WP5 ServicesObjective: to develop service pilots to underpin the sciencedemonstrators and serve as reference implementations forfuture EOSC services. EGI is involved in the definition of the EOSCservice portfolio and the service management framework.WP7 SkillsObjective: to develop an EOSC education and training strategyand coordinate its delivery. EGI will be involved in developingtraining material and workshops on the EOSC services.
RISCAPE: e-infrastructure landscape
Roberta Piscitelli gives an overview of the project
The RISCAPE project is a three-year project set up to provide aninternational landscape analysisreport on the position andcomplementarities of the majorEuropean research infrastructures.RISCAPE builds on the EuropeanResearch Infrastructures (RIs) inthe ESFRI landscape report(2016) and on the analysis doneor currently underway in theH2020 cluster projects.
A landscape analysis involvesidentifying the key players in afield, sector or geography andclassifying them by characteristic
(e.g., type of organization, targetbeneficiary). This helpsnonprofits to under-stand thebroader context in which theyare operating, and design theirstrategy accordingly to maximizetheir impact.
EGI’s role will be to identify inter-national e-Infrastructures indifferent geographical areas, toexamine their common technicalfeatures and the areas ofsocietal challenges that theyfocus on. The EGI team willanalyse the e-Infrastructures viainterviews and desk research.
The analysis will result in theidentification of mechanisms forcooperation including the use ofinternational agreements.
More information
Roberta Piscitelli is part ofthe EGI strategy and policyteam
RISCAPE websitewww.riscape.eu/
5
The Group on Earth Observation(GEO) is a partnership of morethan 200 national governmentsand another organisations thatenvisions a future wheredecisions and actions for thebenefit of humankind areinformed by coordinated andsustained Earth observations.
The GEO community is creatinga Global Earth ObservationSystem of Systems (GEOSS) tointegrate observing systems andshare data by connectingexisting infrastructures. Thereare more than 200 million opendata resources in GEOSS fromover 150 national and regionalproviders (such as NASA andEuropean Space Agency).
NextGEOSS is a 3.5 year projectserving as a Europeancontribution to GEOSS bydeveloping the next generationhub for Earth Observation (EO)data where users can accessdata and deploy EO-basedapplications.
The NextGEOSS projectconsortium is made of 27organisations from 13 Europeancountries, who recently met inLisbon from 16 to18 January tokick-off project activities.
NextGEOSS: Earth Observation
Sy Holsinger writes about how the EGI Federated Cloud will support the new project
EGI and NextGEOSSEGI will contribute to NextGEOSSwith computing resources madeavailable through the EGIFederated Cloud allowing theproject to connect data andcloud computing resources touser communities and enable anintegrated network ofapplication support.
This will initially bedemonstrated through anumber of scientific andbusiness oriented pilots whereEGI will offer technical adviceand consultancy to identify thebest solutions to get theapplications up and running onan integrated cloud platform.
NextGEOSS will also stimulatedata exploitation by commercialenterprises with a number ofbusiness-oriented pilots,therefore EGI will support thedefining formal agreements forlong-term business relationshipsbeyond the life of the project.
More information
Sy Holsinger is part of theEGI strategy and policy team
NextGEOSS websitehttp://nextgeoss.eu/
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
NextGEOSS objectives
> Implement a single accesspoint, federated data hubusing state-of-the-art datamining and discoverabilitytechniques;
> Implement Quality ofService and communityfeedback mechanisms onthe data hub;
> Access to the most relevantdata sources for Europe,across all major EarthObservation domains.
6
AGINFRA+ is a three-year projectset up to support the communityworking on agriculture and foodresearch. AGINFRA+ will furtherdevelop the resources andservices of the AGINFRA project’sresearch data e-infrastructure.
The AGINFRA+ project builds onthe experience and work of itspartners: Agroknow, the AlterraInstitute of the WageningenUniversity & Research Center,the National Agronomic ResearchInstitute of France (INRA), theNational Institute for RiskAssessment of Germany (BfR),the National Research Council ofItaly (CNR), the National andKapodistrian University of Athens(UOA), Pensoft Publishers(PENSOFT) and EGI.
AGINFRA+ will evolve theAGINFRA data e-infrastructureby using core e-infrastructuressuch as EGI to provide asustainable channel addressinguser communities aroundagriculture and food. The projectwill demonstrate how thesescientific communities may carryout rapid development anddeployment of innovativeapplications and workflows,powered by e-infrastructures.This will illustrate the value ofAGINFRA as a virtual researchenvironment for the domain ofagriculture and food.
The kick-off meeting of theAGINFRA+ project was held from16 to 17 January at the INRAheadquarters in Paris.
AGINFRA+: food and agriculture research
Gergely Sipos describes how EGI will support the new initiative
EGI's roleEGI will support the uptake ofthe e-infrastructures in theagriculture domain and will dothat via three use cases:
Food securityGoal: investigate what makesstrategically important cropssuch as wheat, maze and riceresistant to extreme weatherconditions.
How: integrate high-throughputplant phenotyping data with e-infrastructures, deploy the PHISwebservice and new software toextract information from data inorder to find the most resistanttypes.
Agro-climatic & EconomicmodellingGoal: Generate a crop yieldforecasting model
How: scale up the computingcapabilities to improve forecastsof crop and soil types.
Food safety risk assessmentGoal: support risk assessmentusing mathematical models
How: improve the currentsoftware and existing tools to
More information
Gergely Sipos leads the EGIFoundation TechnicalOutreach team.
AGINFRA websitehttp://aginfra.eu/
allow for repeatability. This willbe used to predict the growth ofmicrobes, for instance.
EGI will also participate in thecollection and analysis of e-infrarequirements coming out of theuse cases, offering services fromthe EGI catalogue and bringingin relevant technologies fromthe EGI network. EGI will workstrongly with CNR, member ofthe project and provider of thed4Science system, on supportingthe use cases.
EGI will also contribute to thesustainability activities in theproject. One of the goals of thistask is to facilitate businessengagement and establish anAGINFRA association that wouldensure continuity for the results.
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
7
The goal of the AARC project isto guide research communities,cloud providers or commercialservice providers to navigatetheir way through the galaxy ofcomplex technologies that areused for Authentication andAuthorisation (AAI). The projectis an opportunity forcommunities to work together,to harmonise AAI approachesand to find suitable componentsto manage access to sharedresources.
ActivitiesDuring the lifetime of AARC, westarted a comparative analysisamong the AAI componentsused in the e-infrastructures inEurope, we looked at theassurance aspects among thesee-infrastructures,and thendrafted a blueprint AAIarchitecture and piloted theintegration of several AAIcomponents in productioninfrastructures. All with the aimof gluing AAI componentstogether and providing astepping stone for researchcommunities and e-infrastructures to manageaccess to their shared resourcesin a scalable way.
Attribute management pilotOne AARC pilot task is led by EGIand focuses on the deploymentof components for attributemanagement and consumption
AARC's attribute management pilot
Paul van Dijk on the work behind AARC's latest two deliverables
in a federated environment. Theuse case for this pilot applies tothe needs of e-infrastructures(like EGI and EUDAT), and toresearch infrastructuressupporting multiplecommunities to manage accessin a federated setting. And whyfederated? Because componentssuch as identity providers (IdPs),service providers (SP) andattribute authorities (AA) aretypically operated by separateentities.
The picture below provides asimplified view on the attributemanagement pilot setup wherethe e-infrastructure or researchcommunity can use externallymanaged attribute authorities(such as COmanage and PERUN),aggregate these attributes fromdifferent sources in a centralproxy (SimpleSAMLphp), andforward the enriched set ofattributes in such a way that theycan easily be consumed byservice providers (such asOpenStack Liberty) to makeauthorisation decisions.
More information
Paul van Dijk is CommunityManager for Research atSURFnet
AARC projecthttps://aarc-project.eu/
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
Piloted, proxy based, flow for authentication and authorization in e-infrastructures
The latest deliverablesThe work of the attributemanagement pilot led to twonew AARC deliverables:
> Pilots to support guest userssolutions, and
> First report on the pilotsdeployed by SA1
Both are available for onlineconsultation.
8
The EGI Federated Cloud inte-grates community, private and/orpublic clouds into a scalablecomputing platform for dataand/or compute-driven appli-cations and services. The originalarchitecture was put intoproduction in May 2014.
The EGI community has refinedthe initial concept and evolved itsarchitecture according toemerging user demands.
The architecture is based on theconcept of an abstract CloudManagement Framework (CMF)that supports a set of cloudinterfaces to communities.
Each resource centre of theinfrastructure operates aninstance of this CMF according toits own technology preferencesand integrates it with thefederation by interacting with EGIcore components:
> Service registry for configura-tion management of federatedcloud services.
> EGI AAI for authentication andauthorisation across the wholecloud federation.
> Accounting for collecting, anddisplaying usage information.
> Information discovery aboutcapabilities and services availablein the federation.
> Virtual Machine imagecatalogue and distribution,replicating VM images as neededby the user communities in asecure way.
> Monitoring, performing serviceavailability monitoring andreporting of the distributed cloudservice end-points.
The EGI Federated Cloud architecture
Enol Fernández gives an overview of the federation model of the EGI Cloud
This integration is performed byusing public interfaces of thesupported CMFs, thus minimisingthe impact on site operations.
Providers are organised theOpen Standards and OpenStackrealms, each realm exposing ahomogeneous interface.
The realms use different inter-faces to offer IaaS capabilities tothe users: the Open StandardsRealm uses OCCI standard(supported by providers withOpenNebula, OpenStack orSynnefo Cloud ManagementFrameworks), while the OpenStack Realm uses OpenStacknative APIs (support limited toOpenStack providers). OpenStack was introduced in thefederation in November 2015and can co-exist with the OpenStandards Realm within the sameresource provider.
Users can interact with cloudproviders in several ways:
> Directly using the IaaS APIs ofthe resource centres to manageindividual resources.
> Leveraging federated IaaS pro-visioning tools that allow mana-ging and combining resourcesfrom different providers andenable the portability of appli-
More information
Enol Fernández leads thecloud development activitiesat the EGI Foundation.
cation deployments betweenthem. The EGI Federated Cloudtask force is currently in theprocess of evaluating andselecting the best tools for thistask.
> Using the AppDB VMOpsdashboard, a web-based GUI thatsimplifies the management ofVMs on any provider of the EGIinfrastructure. AppDB VMOpsrelies on the InfrastructureManager, a Federated IaaSProvisioning tool developedwithin INDIGO-DataCloud.
Community Platforms are builton top of the federation, eitherby using IaaS APIs or FederatedIaaS provisioning, and providecommunity-specific data, toolsand applications which can besupported by one or morerealms. New realms can bedefined by agreeing with theproviders on which interfacesand EGI core services to use forthe federation.
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
9
The EGI Conference 2017 andthe INDIGO summit 2017 willtake place this year in Catania,Italy from 9 to 12 May. Theevents are hosted by the INFNCatania, part of the ItalianNational Institute for NuclearPhysics.
The EGI Conference 2017 is theEGI Community's main event of2017.
The conference programme isfocused on the technical road-mapping of EGI, with days dedi-cated to authorisation andauthentication, computeservices both HTC and cloud, aswell as storage & data services.Sessions on e-infrastructuregovernance, procurement andbusiness models are alsoincluded in the programme.
The INDIGO Summit 2017 will bethe flagship event of the INDIGO-DataCloud project, with a focuson user engagement and theINDIGO service catalogue.
This summit explores the solu-tions provided by the INDIGOsoftware, applying them toconcrete use cases broughtforward by scientific communities
Next EGI Conference: Catania 9-12 May
Iulia Popescu on our next event, to be held alongside the INDIGO Summit 2017
and resource providers. Theevent will also be an opportunityfor service providers or serviceintegrators to understand howthe INDIGO solutions andservices are appealing forindustry.
About CataniaThe two events will be held inCatania and the venue is LeCiminiere, a modern museumcomplex housed in a convertedsulphur refinery. Catania is adelightful city, with a rich cultureand history, hosting manymuseums, restaurants, churches,parks and theatres and it’s verywell known for its street food.
The programme for both events
More information
Iulia Popescu works on EGI-Engage & INDIGO DataCloudcommunications
EGI Conference 2017 +INDIGO Summit 2017http://go.egi.eu/cf17
Inspired // Issue #26, February 2017
is online on the conference’swebsite and includes jointsessions, for example the EGI-INDIGO workshop oncommunity application support.
The registration for the events isopen and more information isavailable on the event’s site.
Programme at a glanceTuesday 9 May
EGI ConferencePlenary
EGI AAI Services
Competence Centres
EOSC implementation
EGI-INDIGO workshop
Wed 10 May
EGI Federated Cloud
Joint Services
EGI Security
Earth Observation
EGI-INDIGO workshop
Thu 11 May
INDIGO Summit plenary
EGI NGI Roadmaps:Engagement & Ops
EGI Data Services
INDIGO Open Forum,Solutions, Integration& prospectives
Fri 12 May
INDIGO Data Ingestion
INDIGO brainstorming& conclusions
EGI technical boards(closed)
